


on mottled set of shed wings

by cartographicalspine



Series: The Meek [7]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Assassination, Conversations, Gen, Halamshiral, Orlesian Balls, Orlesian Grand Game, Regicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 17:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16067591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographicalspine/pseuds/cartographicalspine
Summary: It's time for Grand Duchess Florianne to make her final exit, but a certain Trevelyan does as those...quaintcountry Marcher nobles do and once again, she finds herself making a change to her plans.





	on mottled set of shed wings

**Author's Note:**

> Set in my usual AU with Marlise, Mack, and Erzi Trevelyan where they all survive to join the Inquisition.
> 
> This borrows a little from game dialogue, Florianne's wiki, and her short story _The Riddle of Truth._

The grand, luxurious music in the ballroom died with Celene just as she did, sputtering and gasping and agonizing. Some of the musicians fell in quick swoops soon afterward; the Inquisition had slipped more people into the palace than she had expected, but her assassins would root them out easily anyway. She would not risk them taking her victory from her.

_”Florianne!”_

Inquisitor Trevelyan glared up at her from the ballroom floor with something like dismay, but neither she nor her little “Herald” were in a position to follow, surrounded by Florianne’s men as they were. All around the ballroom, their people were falling, and help would be slow to come even if they could hold on long enough. Soft-hearted fools that they were, it probably tore at them that _they_  couldn’t help them all.

Without warning the Inquisitor, lifting her skirts and drawing a sword from somewhere inside all that tulle and mesh, took the head of Florianne’s lead guard with a single swing, and Florianne almost threw her head back in laughter. Her Herald in turn set himself and the closest of the assassins afire, no doubt terrifying half the still-living nobility into devout and holy fear. For a moment, despite how they had thrown her plans for a loop, she almost wished she could have had more time to delight in their rustic, bizarre eccentricities. They had truly been the life of the party in the end.

Regardless, she couldn’t stay any longer.

Florianne abandoned Celene’s body and took to the balconies as any assassin worth her gold would do, cutting down Inquisition soldiers and palace guards she hadn’t bought into her employ in her escape. Despite her hidden defenses and support, the Inquisition would not truly be held back forever, and she needed to fly deep into Orlais, out of their reach long enough to regroup and cement the chaos. Gaspard in the gauntleted hands of the Inquisition or Orlais, that elven handmaid in the shadows not even worth sullying a clean blade on, Celene already cooling on the tiles of diplomacy and love of the arts. Halamshiral in blood-stained hysteria. Her enemies did not realize they had already lost when they first rode in through the front gates a week ago.

But she had a shadow on her. All along the palace walls and rooftops, skirting gilded grotesques and spouts and loose tiles, somehow tailing her closely all the way back to the front of the palace. The chase brought back the thrill she had felt when she first learned to run these beautiful marbled railings and spires.

Tensing her grip on the skirts of her dress, she prepared to fight her way out of the web again; her mother had not raised her with delicate wings. She dropped from the high walls into a smoke screen and tore those wings off, slipping out of a stifling cocoon of satin and papery silk with ease. Then, because she was certain this was not the Inquisitor or the Herald, she allowed them to trail her further into the maze of hedges in the palace courtyard. Who might have pursued her all the way here?

The answer came in a familiar voice, one Florianne had spent too much time trying not to roll her eyes at all evening. The middle Trevelyan, a young budding socialite in Orlesian circles and an academic of the University. Or was he a _failing one_? She always did get his descriptions so confused.

She let him hear her voice, though she made sure he could not tell where it was coming from. “You cannot be serious. Of all the homely Trevelyans in Halamshiral’s dreadful infestation, the one who finally caught up to me is the one who cannot even _fight_?”

He did not respond to her disparaging remarks or laughter but stepped carefully out of the shadow of the foliage-laden arched pathways and into the open. “Grand Duchess, I’m not here to fight. I just want to talk.”

Florianne did roll her eyes this time. All he _ever_ did was talk, and though it had been amusing to watch him drive Lady Pentaghast up the walls with his penchant for rambling from nerves and for getting himself into situations of distress, as well as with that scandal-inducing laugh that all Trevelyans apparently tended to have honed from birth, she was done humoring them, least of all him. She had her victory, and she would not see it spoiled by a group of children barely civilized enough to be called nobility.

“Forgive me for not falling over myself in a swoon at your magnanimity,” she drawled, testing the weight of her bow in her hands. She had no need to; it had been drawn and calibrated to perfection before the ball, but it helped her consider her next moves, her words, her thoughts. “The Empress of Orlais is dead at my hands, before your eyes, and I am to believe all you want is words?”

Talking was dangerous, more so when she was short enough on time as it was, and yet she found herself choosing to pause a moment to listen. Of the three Trevelyans, she found him the least fascinating, the lesser of the small little tadpoles come wriggling into the stagnant pond that was Orlais. She had yet to put her finger on it, but he was too easily overlooked in favor of his cousins’ aptness for diplomacy or military prowess. Something about that festered in her chest, so she had snubbed him all night for it. That didn’t mean she hadn’t keyed in on a few significant things.

“Or did you truly have no strong feelings either way? I’ve heard about your bland lack of interest in all matters universally.” A smile tugged on her lips that anyone versed in Orlesian parlance would have heard, so she was certain that he had taken note. “Yet somehow you managed to entice a little concession from our beloved and beautiful Empress, one that might have permitted your return to the University had she lived. I do wonder if you feel the keen of that loss at all.”

“That isn’t what this is about.” He spoke so plainly and so vaguely that it infuriated her. “Please, it doesn’t have to be too late. Whatever Corypheus has told you, I know you don’t truly believe it’s worth all of this.”

Florianne watched from the shadows as he moved past the shadows, but that was still merely a shadow of where and how he moved. It was all so much like the Game, a tapestry of shifting, hidden truths, like a series of masks for court and street and carousing and home. Like knowing one face all one’s life until one day a new face is in its place, like having the truth of one’s purpose suddenly vanishing like smoke when the Council of Heralds tallies their final vote, like staring at the weave of the windowside of a set of curtains while blood pools beneath the feet. Like living as a shadow for a lifetime until something older than the shadows and veils comes to turn them upside down...or make them as though they never had been. _And offered that then to me._

But Trevelyan did not know these thoughts and could not, plain-faced and open as he was. She had been certain it was a mask, but he truly was that naively, quietly, patiently understanding about everything. He really believed she harbored or could be moved to some remorse over her part in Celene’s death and the machinations of the past few week.

She granted him a little trilling laugh. “You poor, deluded thing. You actually believe that?”

He really did. She had moved along the narrow ledge and to the opposite side of the courtyard, and she could see his face in the silvery moonlight now. Soft, gentle eyes and moderate expression that betrayed no rancor or passion. Some might describe it as serenity, and cruelly one might call him insipid. He was almost as terrible as their so-called Herald of Andraste prancing about with that ghastly marked forehead bared to the public, but he didn’t even have the excuse of having his personhood mutilated. Still, he almost could have succeeded in the Game if it were a true mask he wore and not the actual shape of his character.

“I should thank you, really,” she said, counting her support as they spilled into the shadowy courtyard. She’d been expecting the Lady Inquisitor or the Herald, not their quiet cousin who would never raise a blade or a spark of magic in his life. It was almost laughable how much she had prepared for this confrontation, and ended up containing most of the real threat inside the palace. “You all played your parts marvelously tonight. I feared that between the three of you, I would never make it to Celene’s side undisturbed. A pity that you all survived, but graciously you allowed me my move anyway.”

“You don’t mean that,” he repeated weakly, hesitating in light of her reinforcements. He’d seen more than she expected him to, poor thing. And she thought she might have granted him the mercy of a death he didn’t see coming. “She didn’t have to die, your Grace. No one did...no one does.”

Florianne raised her brow unseen behind her mask and her shadows. “You did not intend for this to happen.”

From his sorrowful tone, she knew she had guessed correctly. “Whatever intentions you think we have, whatever you think _I_ want, how could we have presumed to seek anything but a peaceful resolution?”

“I don’t know whether to pity or admire your staunch devotion to selflessness, but no one remains innocent in the Game. Mourn Celene for whatever reason you like; there isn’t a person in that palace who will shed a tear for the woman beneath the crown.”

Rulers came and went, she remembered as she said this, and while the Council of Heralds would devour itself long enough for the empire to fall to the Elder One, she could solidify her promise to Corypheus more thoroughly with the death of the Inquisitor...and more strongly, far more powerfully, with the Herald’s death. She could surely curry more favor than even the other lieutenants with that marked hand, could she not? And she might know just how to make that come about.

“Perhaps I was hasty with my dismissal of you earlier,” she said lightly, tickling the feathery edge of fletching. His gaze still cast around to look for her, though fool that he was, his spectacles lay forgotten in some corner of the ballroom. “After all, I know well how valuable the least account among the powerful can be. Consider this my thanks in advance, Trevelyan.”

The arrow sang as it flew from her arch fingers, and she listened carefully for the telltale sound, wet and sudden, that it had found new home from her quiver to flesh, and she heard it.

A rare genuine smile crossed her lips, and she dropped off the wall to join Trevelyan in the maze of hedges in the courtyard.


End file.
